Mass Effect 3: Don't Mean Nothing
by Stuch
Summary: Something different. The build up and final battle with the Reapers from the grunt's-eye view on up. No real plot. The experiences of one OC as a memoir to a conflict that the common grunt would have little say in. Rated M, mature prose and content.
1. The World

**Chapter 1: The World**

There were times, more often than not now that I put any thought to it, that she would look at me as though I were from another world. When her face would turn so vacant as I spoke to her, a bemused expression that no universal translator could fix and I would stop mid-sentence despite her protests, "Baby, please. I'm listening." Rolling from her side to knees atop the bed sheets and a look in her eye that said she believed what she was saying. And when I would go on, open that door just a crack and give her a quick peek into parts of me I kept from her, it would inevitably end in tears. Whether they were a reaction to the events I recounted, still unable to fully censor my own mouth of gruesome details that came out as jokes in different company or in response to a change she saw in me? I don't know. Only two things would stop the crying; my leaving the apartment or sex. And both were a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.

That was on leave after my third tour, before Earth fell and when Shepard was still under house arrest for the events in the Bahak system. Before civilian and refugee became one the same and suburban malcontents would happily de-construct my career over what I hoped was going to be a quiet drink away from the apartment. I would come to tell people I was in geology - no follow up queries to that. The worst of them were the morbidly curious. How many did you kill? Come on man, you must. How many? Fuck, just tell me. You sick baby-killer! Disgust at themselves projected back onto me and back over to his buddies so that they could share in the hatred. Left alone with thoughts of death and killing, no sleep that night.

Each return to the World was more juxtaposing than the last and by that third term of leave I was a time bomb of irritability and anxiety. She would bear the brunt of me, the cold sweats and screams in the night. The thick coating of apathy that dripped off me in the waking hours and she learnt quickly not to ask me to make a decision on anything. Twenty minutes in a restaurant, staring at the menu and through it before she ordered for me. It's not that I couldn't make choices but that they were all so mundane in comparison to those out in the field, they didn't matter. I couldn't explain it to her, not without starting another argument. It all felt like a dream and I wanted to wake up back in the spartan squalor and immediacy of life at war.

There were stories of more than one guy who went back of their own accord as mercs. The Alliance wouldn't let them back into the fold without doing the minimum amount of away time in fear of their mental stability but from what I gather they were more than happy to hire them on a private basis. Nobody who went merc was ever followed up with a court martial, as long as your bullets were going the right way.

I was a Spacer, had been all my life, breathing nothing but artificial air for my first eighteen years. Hey you! Wanna see other worlds? Sign your name! Man was that recruitment officer a slick bastard, never seen a man adapt so fast to the needs and desires of others. Twisting and morphing them into a sudden impulse to join the Alliance military and better yet, make you believe you came up with the idea all by your lonesome. First time I set foot on soil I had a rifle in my hand and my first lung-full of an actual atmosphere had to be filtered through my helmet's respirator. I saw so many worlds in those first eighteen months, hide and seek with Batarian pirates and slavers, that even the urban sprawl of the Citadel made me feel cramped and confined in comparison. I had been promised adventure and exploration and I got it, more than any young boy looking out at the stars could have handled. New worlds and beautiful vistas, chewed up and turned brown soon after by our presence. Lush greens I would see from on high flash orange and red before nothing but the impenetrable black. We needed somewhere to land after all, swear I felt the warm ash through the soles of my boots.

Saw my first body that landing, gnarled and twisted just outside the blast radius, cinders on the stretched skin of the skull like a dusting of grey hair. Back exposed and blistered, clothes and skin made as one. A grunt kicked him over, Batarian, just as intelligence said there would be. I puked up almost before I had chance to take off my helmet (others hadn't bothered wearing their own, trees don't shoot back one told me but I would later learn that they loved the smell as I would come to), yellow-white chunks over the grey and black. "Fuckin' new guy. Tell those button-pushers to only do them medium rare next time. Kid doesn't like 'em so crispy." Like being back at school and promised myself I would never make jokes like that. Forgot all about that promise until I broke it. He was a year younger than me on paper but I wouldn't dare say it to his face, his eyes told me he'd seen more in the past year than I had seen in my whole life. Old men at nineteen. Experiences and situations forced at them so fast and hard that you could only wonder when it would release itself again. Every man a reservoir of rage that dams can only hold back for so long.

That was the first story I told her, first time I forced her to cry with tales of my job and the first time we fucked just so we didn't have to talk to each other. I spoke to the corpse once in a dream months later, the grunt kick him over and the four eyes blinked at me. He said he had a secret to tell me, woke up before he did. Always glad I woke up. And the waiter in the restaurant would ask how I wanted my steak. Medium rare. Came out the wrong end into the toilet, soon as we got home. How to tell someone you eventually got used to death? (Even though that first one would stay with me, like I breathed him in and he still swims around in my vital fluids.) That it came everyday like breakfast, bullets with your bacon. Only to get back to the World alive and wake up every day with soft pillows and a warm, semi-naked woman next to you instead of a rolled up shirt and heavy-set Scotsman.

"Ya know she disnae love you like I dae." he said once, mass effected lead hissing over our heads and waiting for a thunderbolt from the heavens (even Zeus didn't rest as on high as the Alliance destroyers). We both laughed, at the joke and the very real idea that it might be the last thought either of us shared. But behind the homoerotic varnish was a hardwood truth, who else could understand what I went through but the man who went through the same? David 'Howler' Young was with me near constantly on the last two of my three tours and beyond, when those great and terrible tentacles slipped tight around the throat of an entire galaxy. One look at him and you would make the assumption that his brains were in his neck, he would happily toy with people on this assumption and at the drop of a hat make his speech all but impenetrable. I got used to it.

His own marriage had fallen through, "Just glad there wasnae a bairn to get caught between us." Kids? Jesus, who could have brought a child into this? He rested his remaining hopes on my marriage and his advice was usually a list of things he considered having done wrong. He hung around our apartment for a spell of a few weeks one time and I swear she was ready to kill me for it, one soldier on a come down was bad enough and soon Howler learnt that I lied when I said it was okay for him to stay. I'd never seen him so meek and fearful as he was around her, "I cannae wait to get shot at again. But dinnae you dae somat stupid and lose her."

Second leave home was the best of the three and we had something close to what might be called a relationship but still far short of a marriage. I made a real effort and pushed it all down deep into my gut, all the death and shock and pain, away from her. Some things cannot be hidden and I would be woken from a post-coital slumber by the light fingertips on my back, knowing that she ran lines between the shrapnel scars and tried to imagine. I would feign sleep to try and cling to the borderline happiness of that spell back in the World.

But if I didn't care for what I found back away from the bullets and blood then the feelings were entirely mutual, if not fervently against me and my own career. For every veteran of the First Contact who would shake my hand and share a drink were three civvies ready to spit on the ground in front of me. Protests against the Alliance's continued 'harassments' of the Batarians were not uncommon on the Citadel and I would find myself gravitating toward them for an argument on more than one occasion. There were rumours (aren't they always) of supplies and funds making their way to Batarian hands from the same groups who would protest in the same safe, bloodless streets. Crazier still was the myth of humans fighting on their side. One grunt swore blind to me it was true, on his mother's non-existent grave no less, though stopped short of telling me where he heard it.

Later I would work on teams of mixed race, the Krogan and Turians would only laugh at these stories of protest and dissent. Ludicrous to imagine a people questioning the military action of their leaders with one Krogan putting it in a characteristically succinct manner, "Humans. Soft everywhere."

The grass is always greener they say and there were times when I longed for nothing more than to be back in the safety of the World. Just a shame it took near death situations to make me yearn for civilian life, for her. When I was hunkered down behind the remains of a concrete wall, rounds chapping at the other side like bleached bone knuckles. Knock knock. Don't answer. No bell tolls for thee and the angels only cry "Git some!" by your side until the weight of incoming forces their shields to give out and they're mortal once more, down with you in the dirt. Terror sent my mind to safer places, soft down on her forearms caught in streaming light or a stolen, stifled gasp in a shared shower. Physical memories (the kind you don't share with the rest to boost the ego), to be close to her is to be far from there.

Worse still to wrap yourself in those sacred thoughts and survive, having exposed them to such horror, such all-encompassing fear. So the next time she surprised me in the bathroom, it turned my stomach and the blood just wouldn't flow. How to explain it? Each world infected the other and faded them in my mind until neither could give me solace.

And when it all began, when that first giant squid came down from the heavens and not up from the deep, it all ended too. No civilians, no World and no more leave. Those who doubted Shepard as to even the existence of the reapers, would be intellectuals and armchair, backseat politicians, screamed foulplay at the incident with the relay. They argued that he had once again used his fabricated reapers, this time as an excuse for the wholesale destruction of a Batarian colony. Laughter ensued at the idea, knowing the Alliance scarcely needed an excuse for the mass murder of Batarians and there were far quieter ways than destroying a relay. Had to wonder what a reaper denier says to himself when that noise, pure dread and psy-ops distilled, came down from the clouds. What does an atheist say to the face of God? Was in a mission briefing half the galaxy away when I heard and we all shared quiet despair until one marine piped up, "Shit man, guess this is the World now. Can't wait to get back out there." We nodded to keep up appearances with each other.

On my first visit back to the Citadel after the whole galaxy when to shit there circulated a story amongst both refugees and soldiers. The race of those involved seemed to hold fast to that of whoever told it and the victim of the tale would usually fall upon the shoulders of a human, salarian or batarian. It concerned an altercation between a soldier and refugee at the 'shrine', that gruesome mosaic of photographs and holovids that inevitably splattered itself upon any surface near where the lost and scattered would gather. Faces of the dead, or as they preferred, missing, striking such carefree poses so as to appear morbidly cheery in their new, hopeless surroundings.

The way I heard it told from an Alliance corporal, a real jumpy kid who stared at any passing female in such a way that suggested that a career of killing had gotten in the way of what he considered a real conquest (lost in uniform before he was even old enough to screw). Who knows how many times it had been re-told and how many new details had been added or removed but the kernel was always still there amongst the frills.

"So there's this private and he's down there up to his ankles in refugee shit and piss, lookin' at that damn 'wall of the missing' or whatever the fuck. An' he says to his buddy, 'Dumb fucks, shoulda run faster' or something and that shoulda been that, ya know? I mean you an' me know what he meant."

Dumb fucks. Better than you than me. Don't mean nothing. Amen. Our own prayer, above and below religion, around the corpse in a huddle. One last helping hand into the shuttle, sitting next to us for one last free ride. Telling jokes, worried he's already had the last laugh on us.

"So this refugee decides that ain't cool, storms over in a fucking rage you know? 'What gives you the right?' an' 'Who do you think you are?' an' all that other self-righteous crap. I dunno maybe he's got his dead missus up there an' worried it's going in the guy's spank bank for later. Anyway, they argue a little an' it eventually boils down to the refugee, 'People are dying! My friends and family are dying! Do you understand what that's like?' Can you believe that shit?" he laughs a little and makes a face as though he wants me to ask what happened next, "Dude comes away with a broken nose an' two fewer teeth. C-Sec had to pull the private off the guy, word is one of the Turians bought him a drink an' the refugee goes and pulls a picture off the wall."

He waits with dead eyes but I don't laugh and he says, "No? Loses something in the telling I guess. Had to be there."


	2. The Soldiers

**Chapter 2: The Soldiers**

I met them all. Young poets who would sum up the whole mess in ten words and dumb bastards who could do the same and never know it. Stonecold killers who had finally found their place in the galaxy, handing out death and very quietly wishing for their own. Quiet types who just didn't know what to make of the whole thing and even quieter types who had decided there was nothing _to_ make of it. I saw a guy on an MG placement pouring out hate and discontent with a such a glazed expression I thought he would yawn at any second. Or the grunt who broke down after killing his first husk, "I'm happier killing people who chose to try and kill me. Reapers made the choice for them." He got over it, of that I have no doubts.

I should stress that the soldiers I met were as varied and unique as the people you could talk to in the street. And I appreciate that my own view of us could give the idea that we were all very unhinged, but the truth it's simply easier to recall the extremes of behaviour than the middle chunk of the bell curve. Easier to remember the young grunt - all peach fuzz and freckles - who knelt down to squeeze the breast of a dead asari and spoke quietly to himself, "Soft." Before he noticed that I saw and moved so fast back to his squad, afraid I would send him up for a court martial. But for every one who did something like that there were a dozen who just did their jobs.

It was an alpha-male world, where any perceivable weakness was prodded and abused until you snapped or it just didn't matter anymore. Prison rules. Abuse was the main currency and absolutely anything could be used against you. Your girl, your kids, your home planet. You were fucked if the guys found out you were a biotic, though they were more than happy to have your abilities in a firefight. Hell, even racism was still prevalent in grunt circle, although tossed out of the window in favour of joining together in hatred of the enemy. But that same grunt who would happily reel off a dozen things he would like to do to my wife is the guy who would give suppressing fire for me without a second thought. Brothers. In every sense of the word, assholes to each other but would take a bullet without hesitation too.

The myth of time was defeated along with galactic peace, no grunt got short and nobody carried that strange magic of having only a couple of weeks left. We were all in for keeps, in that sense at least we were no better than the husks and other reanimated horrors the reapers would send our way. Their obsession with time gone, no calenders or crossed out months were etched onto armour or helmets, some even went the other way. 'NO GOIN' BACK NOW' delicately scratched into a chestplate and a pair of eyes that never looked at you but right fucking in as he tapped the motto for emphasis. He was the first marine I spoke to on Earth and if he didn't just sum up everyone else I had the pleasure of speaking to who had survived there all that time, like he was put there to greet people to let them know what they were in for. Boatman on the Styx. I asked him a whole bunch of questions, feeling more green than straight outta bootcamp, before realising he'd had to answer them all before.

"How did you survive here for so long?"

"Doesn't matter if we fuck this up." The master plan, take back London. And then he softened up some as though remembering how you should talk to people, "You know, just keep your head down _and _on a swivel. Tell me you you have some fucking smokes." I became his 'best friend in the galaxy' and he lit up but forgot to smoke it, gently consuming itself as we stood in silence in an ash-strewn tenement buildings. The sounds of battle so close and yet... It wasn't until he walked away that I saw the punchline on the back of his armour, squeezed onto one shoulder blade, 'NO GOIN' FORWARD EITHER'.

There was a gulf, a fucking chasm, in the Alliance forces between those who lasted on Earth, besieged and beset and those who came to liberate it. I knew which side I was on. "Where the fuck have you been?" was a common joke, equal parts heartfelt and mocking. Soldiers who had spent weeks splitting open husk skulls and finding nothing but new information about themselves, unable to put it back in again. Strung out, empty and tired. Tired. The word just didn't cut it and no amount of searching could provide you with one that did. You could punch a guy square in the jaw and get nothing but, "Sorry man, you say something?"

The first wave of the invasion that made it down to the scorched surface of Earth would talk of the troops they hooked up with on the ground after setting up a perimeter, "They would look at you like you weren't real, you just _couldn't _be real." All official after reports were full of manly, tearful reunions and fistbumps, long overdue relief and the first honest smile across many a face for weeks. There were far darker tales too, not fit for public consumption. One spoke of a special forces outpost in one of the outer London burghs where a single husk corpse was left on the ashen ground in the middle of the men's make-shift shelter. It was sprawled on its back, mouth agape and arms outstretched, a single hole in its forehead. A shuttle of two relief squads found the men hunkered down and in relatively good spirits until they asked about the husk.

They didn't seem shaken by the incident, what happened just happened. It didn't make much noise, got in amongst them and killed one man before the others put it down. They then went on to explain they pissed in its mouth every time the need took them and the relief troops laughed at what they thought was a joke. The mood went sour but the fresh-faced grunts didn't notice that the special forces were not laughing along with them. It was when one of their 'rescuers' was about to join in with the ritual that it all kicked off, zipper scarcely down before he was tackled to the ground and pummeled by the lean, unclean special forces grunt. The moral was made clear to their saviours; when a husk takes down one of _your_ squadmates then you can piss in its mouth, but until then it means more to us than you do.

Bonus points for pissing in the bullet hole, there was always a punchline. Like a test to see if you had been worth spending the time telling the story. I always imagined the slack-jawed husk laughing at them fighting each other around it. I could see the special forces clearly in my mind as I was told the story for the first time, all bearded and filthy, in for long haul and discussing if husks were edible. Easier still to think of their reaction to being told they were about to be rescued, "Didn't know we needed it."

Special Forces. Now there was a term that often bordered on understatement. N4s and above, guys who appeared and disappeared to and from bases at will with their unkempt hair and personalised weapons. Only after they were gone would we hear about what they did. Some ammo dump destroyed or a batarian general mysteriously killed in the middle of his own camp - Black Widow round gone through two walls before his skull. Pure speculation, naturally. Their feats sucked into myth and hyperbole, gaps filled with chinese whispers. They had their work cut out for them even before the "Fall of Earth", when the Alliance needed things done quietly. It was the same all over I'm sure, turians, asari and salarians for certain were as fond of their elite troops as the humans were. It was a wonder that when they worked together it didn't descend into a bloodbath of old feuds.

But things were desperate, hell, the whole galaxy was. Enough that I was drafted in as part of these hastily constructed, patchwork squads. I had skills beyond that of your average grunt sure but i I was a rookie compared to some of operatives I was sent on missions with. Consummate professionals; personal, political and even racial differences were either ignored or pushed down deep enough to be forgotten. Only once was my presence on a team ever questioned, a krogan wondering why some untrained _human_ was tagging along and a salarian jumped to my defense. Reading off his omni-tool, "He's an Alliance ATO, bomb disposal, here to take care of things you can't fix by charging at them."

"Oh yeah? What's he got that makes him so special?"

I felt it was safe to join in and make jokes, so I help up a hand for him to see, "Five fingers for one thing. Can you say the same?" He gave me a death stare for a few seconds and broke in laughter.

Those that I met were a different breed than the average grunt. No doubt there were exceptions, examples who straddled the line and fell into both camps but for the most part the special forces were intelligent, focused, methodical and seemingly immune to many of the vices that grunts couldn't seem to live without ("I got this young FNG in my squad," a captain told me once, "Real green, word is that he punishes his unit three times a night. Poor bastard must be red raw.") Widely read and preferring their own company, they definitely carried themselves in a manner that got the marines talking after they walked past.

"Shit dude, fuckin' Novembers are here. Things gon' get real fuckin' hairy from here on out."

"That name ain't gonna stick, so stop. What is he? N6? Guy ain't no Shepard."

"_You _ain' no fuckin' Shepard yo'self. An' you ain' no N6 neither, that dude is bad ass. Check out his Matty, you ever see a scope like that? Novembers get all the best gear."

They were dangerous men. I mean any grunt with a weapon in a war scenario was dangerous but the difference between them and the special forces was that the latter were not created purely by the war. Grunts were lumps shaped and moulded into killers by Alliance training and further refined into soldiers by actual combat. The specials were somewhat similar in that respect and yet more, something that made the hairs on your neck stand up when they looked at you - like they were remembering the dozens of ways to kill you with their bare hands. An eagerness for conflict that went beyond ego and the matter of fact manner that they would use to discuss operations. To them the front line was just something they had to go beyond and behind to do any work.

London, in the old subway tunnels, I met an N7 sitting away from the other members of his mish-mash company. He was small and wiry, stood out from the pumped-up, tattooed grunts and had fashioned a maintenance duct into a small living space in the tunnel wall, five feet from the ground. "I was on leave when the squid hit us, nice little place out in the country but still felt the shockwaves," he gazed off as though his eyes could bore a hole out of the city to the cottage, "Picked up my gear and got a ride to the nearest base easy enough, Bristol or somewhere. They were evacuating, really freaking out and I was given the choice of heading north or London. If I'd gone up north for evac I would be on the Citadel now hoping it all works out okay. It was too late when I got to London and I was stuck here."

He smiled and I knew he was pleased at how things turned out. I told him how Shepard made it off Earth and brought us all back to break the siege. "Of course he left Earth," the N7 was dead pan with his mockery, "Officers have better survival instincts than the rest of us." The most famous N7 was Shepard naturally, graduate of all the same courses as the stern-eyed, galaxy-weary humans I worked with in the time leading up to the retaking of Earth and those I met there. But that was where the similarities ended and whilst there were exceptions to the rule, most special forces did not consider Commander Shepard to be one of their number.

We had our own language, a delicate balance of slang, military jargon and the bastard offspring of both. Some of it was far easier to decipher than others; we spoke of squid and not reapers, four-eyes and not batarians. Acronyms became words and any name your brothers gave you took precedent over the one your mother did. Translators were useless and when those multi-racial, political point-scoring teams were thrown together, the early days and missions were spent absorbing each others' slang.

"What's a pog?" a krogan asked me, "You humans bitch and moan about them."

"Heavy 'o'," I corrected him, "Poge. Papa oscar golf. Persons other than grunts."

He laughed and laughed, "No such thing as a krogan poge."

"So what's a REMF?" a salarian added his two chits, "Isn't it the same thing?"

"Yeah we got so many of them we need more than just one word."

It was a very early mission and there were four races on board, sat together in solidarity. They took footage before we left for recruitment purposes, the cameraman was foaming at the mouth when an asari appeared, "This is gonna sell _real_ good."

She tried to be the voice of the reason when we were inbound, "A place for everything and everything in its place. Just because somebody isn't on the front line doesn't mean that-"

"Fuck that shit."

The jargon and slang may have joined in holy union to form our vernacular but they were both screwing profanity on the side. It was our punctuation, the capital letter and full stop of every sentence. It was all about context and tone; motherfucker was at once our worst insult and greatest accolade.

"This motherfucker right here" or "that motherfucker over there". I thought I was bad enough back in the World, but being surrounded by full-fledged marines turned my vocabulary regal blue. It all tied back into the idea of brotherhood. Your big brother swears? So do you, worried it's some sign of weakness not to. Unspoken peer pressure and before you know it you'd call your own mother a motherfucker and laugh at her for getting upset. And yet, some were worse than others.

Those batarian worlds where we dealt with a legitimate colony were the toughest, a mixture of innocent populace and pirate pieces of shit. The marines would be given a mandate to separate the two and everyone was _real_ jumpy about who they could shoot - or more importantly who was likely to shoot them. Sneaky fucks leaving explosive devices wherever Alliance boots might tread, defusing bombs in broad daylight with an audience of local, seemingly innocent, four-eyed gawkers.

"Oi! You wee cunt!" a gruff Scots accent from Sergeant Young, "Aye, you! Get tae fuck! Fuck off! Wee cunt!" Even the other marines on watch blushed at his outburst. But he was edgy, crazy some would say, unless there were rounds cracking passed his ears. Enough on edge even to verbally berate a batarian child for being curious. I told him to calm himself, just a kid. "Aye, just some wee four-eyed cunt now. Reporting back tae his fuckin' dad, future fuckin' pirate. Wee shite. All these fucks are workin' for the slavers!"

He more than made up for his foul mouth as a sergeant and leader. The other grunts might not have understood half of the words coming out of his mouth but they had zero problem following him down a trail, "Guy that crazy? You know he's going to be just fine, not a fucking scratch." His nickname, Howler, came from one terrifying night when he and I were attached to a company of marines holding fast to a small base near what was the frontline against a large pirate force (larger than 'intelligence' would have had us believe). The batarians came as close as they dared and took pot-shots at us, in return we sent up illumination flares and breathed fire from machine gun nests around the perimeter.

The two of us sat just inside the concrete levee between us and all their hate, trapped inside. We just watched the tracers go out from the MG nests at anything that could have been called movement and listened to the fevered voice of the gunner, "I can go all night baby! All night!" and his spotter, "Man, you ain't hittin' fuckin' shit. Listen man, they still laughin' at yo' ass." They were spooked by the batarians, we all were and the marines couldn't drown them out, the cat-calls, threats and mocking jibes. Promises of death and mutilation that we all knew would never happen but what else was there to do in such a stalemate?

Sergeant Young hated it, I could hear his teeth grinding and the flares lit up his face red and green, dead set on death and brimstone. Our major difference as soldiers was in what caused us stress. I was real spooked under fire and a bullet going over my head had me using muscles in my ass I didn't know even existed. I was in my element when defusing , the promise of instant death didn't phase me. But Young didn't seem to be alive unless under fire, helped him function as a human being - he would describe it as 'coming unglued' - and quiet, creeping dread had him climbing the walls. So that night as the jeers and threats sailed through the still night air, I could see the anger building in his agitated movements and chain smoking. I've asked him since why he did it and although he fed me all sorts of bullshit, I think even he didn't know.

He stood up on the concrete and howled at the sky, deep and guttural. My initial response was to fall about in giddy laughter and he went on and on until he needed to catch his breath, but by then it had caught on. The pairs in the MG nests had given up on their bickering and were howling between outpourings of lead, marines who had come out of their bunkers to see what the fuss was were joining in. Shirtless and screaming at the sky. To have been a batarian pirate that night, initially bemused and eventually wondering just what type of men the Systems Alliance had sent to invade their tiny, captured world. It sure as shit shut them up.

Even I eventually caved and joined in, a wonderful feeling just to let go of it all. To look back I would have to admit we were all a little crazy trapped in that base and the opportunity to let rip was a welcome one. And the following day when we moved back out on daylight patrols, 'Howler' was out front, eyes wild and his blood up, desperate for some enemy contact, "Wee fucks, scaredy wee bastards. Think they're all so hard at night, aye, but when we come out for a square go? Cunts, the lot o' them." Muttering like a real psycho, rifle at the ready but the enemy had disappeared, same as they did every morning. Despite this the marines had a new explanation for their vanishing.

"Shit man, would you hang around knowing _that _crazy fucker was about to come out and meet you? The Howler scared 'em off last night. Four-eyes pissed they pants and ran. The perimeter isn't for keeping them out, it's to keep us in."

The batarians came back that night with their pot shots and probing of our defenses but their psy-ops didn't, no shouts or jeers were thrown over the walls that night or any night thereafter. 'Howler' became a minor celebrity amongst that battalion and there were times after when he was recognised and praised by small groups of grunts. In those situations where you're all left a little bit unhinged, heroes are those soldiers who can channel it positively.


	3. Killing

**Chapter 3: Killing**

"You know about all that anti-nuke stuff back at the end of the twentieth century? Scariest things we ever made at the time, take out a small city in an instant. For the longest fucking time only _two_ had ever been dropped in anger, two! These days I drop more than that in one bomb run. Thanks to these new eezo warheads don't nobody give a shit about nukes anymore." He was some hotshot bomber pilot and he knew it. 'PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR FIREPOWER' painted on the side of his vessel, sitting in the hangar of the Alliance frigate like the pale horse of Death himself.

"Destroyed a small moon once," he said like it was nothing, "Make room for a new space station or something. Got lucky with a drop and it fell down a fissure, cracked the thing open like a nut!" So I asked what he thought of anyone who happened to be in the blast radius of his runs, his reply and his smile were at complete loggerheads, "Ain't nobody down there when I lay them nukes out, you can go have a look there yourself, won't find sweet fuck all. And if there was some four-eyed base down there before I fly over - and I ain't saying there ever is cos there ain't - _if_ there was you can put your money on all their asses getting vaped to oblivion. But that _never _happens."

He repeated himself for eerie emphasis, "Yup, thanks to these eezos don't nobody care where the nukes go."

More than a few of us were husks before the reapers worked any of their voodoo, scooped near clean of our humanity and capacity to love. For some the joke was freakish in its reality; all that changes is the side you fight for. We all killed, the frontline grunts, we killed and we were paid to do so - even the very bare bones of the arrangement were hard to justify. Some took to this well, very well and strained at the leash when out on patrol, desperate for contact and blood. I cannot say how firsts were for everyone, only myself, simply because of the multiple ways in which you could pop your blood cherry. Your first could be a mid-range rifle shot and never know for sure after the body fell out of sight or a real frantic, up close and personal encounter which left you in no doubt.

They say you never forget it but I met grunts who would happily stand there trying to remember, "Shit man, _now _you're asking." Do you remember your first cup of coffee? I remember the batarian rising up from cover, the difference between seeing him with my eye and seeing him in the scope. Two rounds centre-mass and one in the grape. It was beautiful, terrifyingly so and I hated myself for the mental hard-on it gave me. Behaviour and reation, that's all it was. Ethics and morals could be added to the mix later, decide if you're still a good person or not. Or think nothing of it at all as others would happily decide for you.

Any morally conscientious person in that situation was presented with a delicious conundrum; you would hate that psycho in your squad, the axe-crazy mad man who kept count and had no problem with killing civilians. But hot damn if that same psycho didn't save your fucking _life_ more times than you could count and keep on doing it without a second thought.

"Holy fuck! You just lit up a fucking kid!"

"Efficiency. Saves us coming here again and shooting him when he's old enough to shoot back."

There circulated during the ensuing peace a top secret report about Cerberus and their operatives, claiming they were not as human as they seemed. 'Indoctrinated' was a word tossed about a lot but the actual details were very, very sketchy. The main sources were the after-action reports of Commander Shepard and nobody would dare question the word of the great man himself, especially as he wasn't around to confirm or deny. It was postulated within this "leaked" report that Cerberus was acting on behalf of the reapers and had engaged in 'crimes against humanity', going so far as to biologically alter their operatives. To one intelligence analyst I spoke to after its release, the meaning was clear.

"We killed a lot of Cerberus operatives. A _lot._ Even before they sided with the reapers, that is a lot of human on human violence which doesn't sit well with the public. Even the very idea of Cerberus is a difficult one, how do you explain that someone has a different view of how the galaxy should be than the great and glorious Systems Alliance? They found something in Shepard's reports, I don't doubt that, some mention or rumour that one section of Cerberus was doing these things, these crimes and tarred the whole organisation with the same brush. Then suddenly you guys hadn't been shooting other humans, but genetic monsters. And hell, it's not as though we had ever altered our soldiers before putting them out in the field, had we? Have you read the rest of Shepard's reports? Secretly leaked in full? Give me a break, the whole thing is Alliance propaganda to give reason to the awful things we all did." The same thing we had always done, kill and kill and kill, but now the public had to believe we had been right in doing so.

After the war, when everything was said and done and the great clean up of Earth began, we were hailed as heroes. I was told that my actions were noble and selfless, that I was owed a great debt for my service. What I was owed and what I wanted were two different things; I wanted to forget all the things the surviving public were happy to jerk me off for, wanted to forget all the things I saw on Earth - London in particular. People didn't want to hear that of course, it was a 'great and wondrous' victory that would be remembered for generations. Earth would not rise from the ashes though, as they would be covered first and the dead forgotten before reconstruction began. You couldn't talk to anyone about the killing - the sheer, genocidal scale of it - as it didn't fit in with the victory feeling. I was told just not to worry, it was justified, right and so long as didn't _enjoy_ it then you were fine. And for them, the people we put our lives on the line for, that was enough.

I think sometimes about what they suppose happened in the retaking of Earth. Defeat is a very neat, tidy term and with it you can pretend all sorts of things, ignore facets of the fight that you might find unsavoury. Makes it easier to forget that husks died the same as peope; fast and messy, slow and noisy. A grenade going off in a group of them had no less impact on the psyche than amongst any fleshy humanoid; limbs landing at your feet. How does it feel to be asked by the brass why you aren't smiling? Some yellow belly who had been twiddling his thumbs at the Crucible, overseeing construction or whatever, "You should be pleased, you helped score a great victory for the galaxy!" And I would tell him how it didn't seem that way. "They were just the reapers' monsters, don't cry for them." Nor would anybody cry for us, when the effects of what we had done surfaced later. Ex-grunts who couldn't sit at the dinner table without a sidearm. Congratulations on your great victory, now go back to a life of not killing.

An Alliance admiral was once asked if he considered the invasion of Torfan and its ensuing bloodbath a success. "I would have to see the figures on that, but I am almost certain that we killed more than we lost." No smile, no irony and scarcely an ounce of self-realisation. Kill counts. When all else fails, when you are left standing there and the dust settles having spent days taking a worthless rock, nothing raises the spirit of the higher ups like an estimated enemy kill count. Sometimes there was even the follow up information of how many allies were lost in the achievement and then those brief moments of silence as they tried to calculate the ratio in their heads. We had a joke that the standard Alliance letter of condolence was always ready to go and discarded when you came back alive.

Killcounts were split between different outfits and so forth, usually after the action was over and the level of guesswork far outweighed any actual counting ("Batarians are sneaky bastards, drag away their dead and wounded.") I never paid them much heed nor did many other of the ATOs, we had other counts going on. Overall counts were for the politicians and the public to decide if we were still worth sacrificing in the name of galactic stability. What were far more pressing were the grunts' personal kll counts. More often than not any squad or platoon would have one guy keeping track on his omni-tool of the others in the group.

"It's a tough job," one of them told me - a real wiry, black grunt, "But nobody has to do it. The bribes make it worthwhile and it gives me something to do." And if he didn't just take it job seriously, with each count broken down to individual troops types with the brutes and wraiths often given multiple credits. "I don't count my own," he went on, "Be a conflict of interest or whatever. If you're gonna do something it's worth doing right, right?" And what happened if he got hit? "They've all agreed that can't happen. I'm too good at this to get zapped." There it was again, faith and hope wrapped so tight in machismo that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was pure stupidity.

And some went all the other way too, the wealth of opportunity for slaughter left many unwilling to count. A sniper team, one human and one turian were with me on a mission to some desolated research post. "It used to be _all_ about the count," the human told me, "You'd pop a few grapes at five hundred yards, hump over and check the bodies then get an officer to confirm them. In one year I got eighty, confirmed. Loads more that I didn't do the paperwork on, didn't get the chance or couldn't be bothered or whatever. Paperwork though, precision killing is a business."

The turian snorted, "We didn't even need to confirm them. So long as your spotter saw it happen you were good. You'd get some pair of jokers who would bump their counts for giggles. But for me? Killing was something to take seriously, to have a little pride in."

But times were different after the coming of the reapers, ambushes were vast, heavily numbered but often ineffectual and the pickings were easy. A squad of marines with their wits about them could hold off dozens of husks ("It's all a case of firing off enough bullets.") and the snipers had all they could handle, "I'm getting eighty on a good week now, let alone a year. All of them unconfirmed. They come over the net and tell me they found some half dozen they could easily call mine but I don't want 'em. It's too fucking easy to kill these ghouls but the worst thing is that it doesn't mean shit."

The turian piped in, "There's no challenge out there, just slaughter on both sides. I can fire one round and sometimes they're so thick it gets two or three. Those first few times you patted yourself on the back but you got so used to it. So many of them." Eventually all the kill count did was remind you that if they wanted, the reapers could send more than you could handle and the even more terrifying thought; why didn't they?

The circles I moved in after the victory left me open to a lot of stories, we all wanted to make sense of what happened of course but there were also tales that filled me with dread. A buck sergeant told me this one. "We were dug in deep and those first few times they sent nothing but husks. After the invasion I guess they had a few to spare. We had five MGs across the line and about fifty rifles, scouts spotted 'em before they came over the ridge so we're all out there ready. Man, we shoulda listened to them when they came back, they were real fuckin' spooked. Never seen anything like it, like a mass or a goddamn swarm of the bastards coming over the hill. Hundreds, thousands? The MGs opened up first and it was wonderful, man. Just pure. Don't know how else to tell you. You watched the tracers disappear into them, so busy I almost forgot to open up myself. You couldn't miss, even the rounds that went a little high would hit one further back.

"And they kept coming and coming, clambering over each other, over the legless torsos that are clawing their merry way toward us. Where the MGs focused there were fucking piles of them! We're all whooping and hollering, having a blast, you know? Just pouring out the lead, fish in a barrel doesn't come close.

"But there came a point, and it was different for each of us, that it stopped being fun. When you found that you were running out of thermal clips and burning your hands on the MG barrels. And they were still coming over the hill. Still! We had to go back to the days before the clips. You know, firing 'til the thing goes nuclear and then waiting 'til it cools again. Like being useless, watching them get closer and closer until you got hard again. Yeah man, that's how we talked about it after, blowin' your load and waiting for the blood to get back in your gun. 'Cept this time the pussy fucks you!' I remember one marine screaming that before he let rip, crazy shit.

"I couldn't tell you how long this went on, husk after husk, just churning them up. So freaked that even when they did stop coming we kept popping rounds into the corpses. Maybe it was only an hour, who knows? But there were faces that looked ten years older. We celebrated a little bit after, happy to have held them off again. But then the same thing happened the next day and the day after that. Fuck celebrating after that, didn't matter that not one of the hollow bastards got through we were all too spooked, barely sleeping. But it wasn't until the fourth day that things got real freaky 'cos they _didn't_ come.

"We were all out there on the line waiting for them, begging the first husk to come over and say hello. But it never did. Guys falling asleep on their feet but still talking to you. One accidentally shot himself in the foot and everybody was on edge that we let loose on the corpses out there and it took two minutes for word to get around to cease fire.

"If it had come to an actual war, ground war, like London but everywhere we would have lost. I learnt that on the fourth day and most of the marines there did. The reapers were built for that shit, we weren't. Don't matter how hardcore we thought we were, how many we brought down, how good we were at killing them. They had the stamina, they could fuck us all day and let us think we were fucking them."


	4. Death

**Chapter 4: Death**

There was so much of it that death, dying, died and dead just weren't enough. You could get fucked up, torn up, shot up, lit up, blown up, chewed up, and ripped up. Get wasted, greased, screwed, fucked, cooked, toasted, vaped, shredded, warped, battered, smashed, husked. _Reaped_. Goddamn if that word didn't take on a new, deadly wonderment to it. It covered all scales and bodycounts. Squads, regiments, fleets, planets, systems. All were reaped and left barren, civilisations lost and forgotten.

Death reeked, clung to me like a baby at my breast, sapping me of something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tickled the nostrils and loitered in the throat, heavy but refusing to go down. Your helmet and respirator were useless against it because they went on with the stench already inside. Some fucking new guy asked the question once, "How do you guys put up with the smell?" Before the cat calls and abuse could begin one mean-looking special forces sergeant stops behind him.

"The trick, kid," his tone was dead serious, "You take a finger and stick it up your ass. Bore around a little until you get a good nugget and then rub it across your top lip. That'll stop you smelling the corpses."

"Yeah but then all I'll smell-" he didn't get to finish for the rest of us laughing.

Special forces just shook his head, "FNG, get smart or get dead."

Or the time I ran toward a shuttle without seeing the long, zipped up bags but the air around the machine was thick with information on what they contained. Even the krogan broke his stride as the gases of the dead wormed their way into us anyway they could find. The pilot tried to remove our fears, "They were dead when they got on, if that makes the decision any easier." One of the heaps threatened to fall out during the flight (we _had_ to keep the doors open) and I was closest, arm clutching at the stiff, rigor mortis legs and glad to be away from the head. Too easy to imagine the eyes staring into me through the rubber-canvas, "It ain't so bad, you'll like it."

Your brain strained to find some connection or common thread to the random madness, but in the end it came down to the soldier's best friend; superstition. If only there had been some reasoning to it, some equation you could have used to calculate your life expectancy. The initial frame of mind was to go to the most pessimistic end of the spectrum.

Some guy keeps talking about his wife and kid, safe away on some far off colony and far from reaper eyes ("Sure, for _now_."), about how he's fighting to get back to them? Guy with something to live for, real stand-up prick. You _had_ to believe he was fucked, ordained for death the moment he brought out the picture of his kid. Better to aim low and be proven wrong than to have all that faith and hope sucked right out of you. Or there'd be some grunt with a death wish (probably a krogan) who would run out into enemy fire like it could make him whole again. The movie-myths in your mind tell you he'll survive or die in a way that has meaning, lie there long enough to whisper some profundity in your ear.

Better still if he could take a bullet for the guy trying to get to his family, real John Wayne fantasy shit, and give words of encouragement. But the reapers don't care if you have kids or you're wearing lucky boxers or whatever else. More's the like that both of them will die, messy and brutal, blown to chunks and sharing one body bag. No hushed final words. Those who survive will remember them by adding the information of their demise to all the rest and begin again to try and figure it all out.

"He had it coming?"

"Which one?"

"Both of them."

"Fuck off."

"I'm tellin' you."

They only ever say that afterwards. It was the flipside of a squad deciding one their number was a lucky charm, it only decided after something fortuitous happened to them even though they would always say otherwise, "I always knew that guy was lucky, I just didn't say nothin'." And there would be that one grunt who would pick a new guy each day who was "most_ definitely_ going to get zapped". Our own harbinger when got down to London was wrong so often that his prophecies had the opposite effect and when he named you it was almost a relief. But throw enough darts and you'll eventually get a bull.

My squad was being shuttled across the city to reinforce a staging area for the neverending stream of troops coming down through atmosphere. "That kid is gonna get hit," the prophet spoke and motioned to the private standing in the open doorway, "Look at him, tempting fate o'er there." The sucking gale from the opened hatch was a godsend, if the air moved fast enough it almost seemed fresh. To get the most of it you had to be at the door but we were all too freaked by what we found on Earth to do it. Most of us anyway.

The kid was young but by no means green, his armour scratched and buffed. He was an odds man and would offer bets on anything from getting a contact on a particular patrol to what you would find in your ration. His chestplate carried graffiti, scratched haphazardly, of his the bets he had taken on his own life and the everchanging odds had been notched and crossed out as the situation around him changed. Since his arrival on Earth the odds sat at one in three. I asked him once how somebody would collect if he died and just laughed at me, shaking his head.

"Hey Bookie!" one of the squad shouted over the wind of the door, "Wilson just fingered you for today! It has been foretold!"

"He willing to put money on that? His track record ain't so hot."

"You're fucking nuts standing in the door," Wilson roared, "_Asking_ for a marauder or cannibal to catch you in the skull."

"If I'm gonna die in a shuttle," Bookie spoke almost as though reassuring himself, "I'd rather take the lead and fall out than go down in fire and twisted metal. Besides if they manage to get me at this range and speed? Hell, they've earnt it." No soldier I met every prayed for survival but that any death they were destined for was quick. Maybe they figured life was a pretty big thing to ask for or worse, that it would leave them in debt to God - the kind of debt a grunt finds hard to pay back through a career of death and destruction. A quick one though? ("You're taking me anyway you bastard, just get it over with.")

In that sense, Bookie's logic was sound but ignored the greatest love/hate relationship of an Alliance marine; the one between a marine and the shuttle. Protector and killer rolled into one, a magnet for enemy fire and shield from it. They would drag you straight toward death, kicking and screaming, sweating inside a tin can. Waiting and oblivious. Or it would pull us back out again, left you wondering just how close you came to the end. The level of noise inside depended on how used to the shuttle its contents were. New guys were loud as frat boys until that first incoming buried itself in the shuttle's belly, the sound in your feet first, and would turn silent as the dead - some more than others, dumb, dead fucks.

More experienced passengers kept a more conversational volume throughout and only paused briefly at the promise of death, perhaps comment on the level fire, "Cerberus has got his shit together today. 'Bout time." This easy, casual manner had nothing to do with not being afraid. We all had white-knuckle shuttle trips or rides when I could scarcely hold onto my lunch. It was just that we were so used to it, bored of being afraid but still feeling it every time. If we could have woken up from death we would have gotten bored of that too. After the krogans of course, they were almost unaware of its finality as things were.

Which is why Bookie ignored the rounds that arched up at our shuttle and dug into the hull like ticks. I knew he was watching the lightshow, transfixed by the gridwork of London and the network of fire and death. Eyes unable to pick out the enemy until the red silk thread shot out of a reaper to the ground. Maybe if he hadn't been there already hogging the door, I would have. I loved it when the shuttle banked and turned me toward the ground. All those times I considered simply letting go and stepping out. You felt so far from everything, secure. Until the bullets hit and brought you back. "You are fucking asking for it man," Wilson had gone beyond his aloof prediction, something he used to pass the time as much as anything else, "Get away from the door."

The bullet, some real lucky roll of the dice from the ground, took Bookie in the throat and he went down against the back of the pilot's cabin, legs out with a confused expression on his face. Mouth agape and the lungs sucked in a mixture of air and blood, blowing red bubbles from the puncture in his neck. The breathing was staggered and random, the body about to give up the fight. The squad's corpsman was out of his seat but Bookie was already gone, any wiseass remark remained in his throat. Clotted and held forever.

The pilot came over the comms and reacted to the news of the KIA as though he had dropped his keys, "Oh." And we thought were were detached from it all. I've been told more than once that marines - and their counterparts in the militarys of other races - didn't take death seriously. That we like to make light and makes jokes, treat war as though the whole thing were some game. Never heard something come so close to the truth only to do a massive u-turn. War is _the_ game, the biggest and best, multi-faceted beyond imagining. Losing means death. We would laugh and joke about death because for some, myself amongst them, it was all you could do not to break down and give up. What was death to civilians other than something so very far away? Something they would only ever pretend to take seriously as anything else mysterious to them. Try telling a nineteen year old splattered with the remains of his company commander that he's a desensitised baby-killer.

How could I walk passed a pile of bodybags and not question my own squishy mortality? Death was half of the husks' capacity to create terror, the very idea that you would continue on after death as one of them. A fear replicated for the other races as the war continued and more home planets fell into fire and death. Conversations on the thought were short.

"You think you're aware? You know, like, _awake_?"

"All the more reason to kill the fucks."

Never did find out why the reapers liked London do much or as one marine joked, "S'not like they's taking any pictures." And whilst the city became pockmarked by destruction and fires burned on, the London Underground became the new, albeit majorly less-populated, metropolis. The infrastructure was largely intact, designed as it was to hold up an entire city that was no longer above it. Miles and miles of tunnels, almost never-ending. It wasn't comfortable by any stretch of the imagination but it was defensible, marines are never under siege only well dug-in. Where the safest place within was, the place farthest from certain death, no frontline grunt knew but they knew who was safe in there.

"Fuckin' Anderson, limp-dick motherfucker. Hiding away in some bunker while I wait for a husk to shove its arm down my throat."

"Whoa! Hey! Careful how you talk man, Anderson did his time as a dumb asshole like you. Maybe if you don't die then one day _you'll_ be the one in the bunker and some new dumb asshole will be calling you a limp-dick motherfucker." I remember the two of them only in harsh black and white, manning an MG at one of the tunnels that allowed access to the surface. They loved it when husks were unlucky enough to find it, always picking their argument back up after their strobe-lit massacre. Everyone and everything down there had that same stench, the reek that brought home what was always waiting just around the corner.

One of them saw me wretch for a moment, "Breathe that shit in! All natural, good for you man. Free range husk rot, mmm-fucking-hmm!" Hiding from death left us surrounded by it but there were guys who managed to find a place for themselves down there.

He told me his name was Jack Jackson but everybody in the tunnels called him Ratman and only the second part was true. "That ain't my real name o' course. My old man was a real kook, off his nut most of the time including when he named me. So yeah, I renamed myself an' the guys got a pool on what my real name was. Between you an' me none of their guesses are close." You would have called him the runt of the litter, short and lean, but he had the same dead stare of the bigger grunts who made their new homes under London. I asked what he did with his time now, "Been growin' a beard. Missus never let me before, you know? An' she ain't around no more to tell me not to, said it made her face itchy. No face to get itchy no more, that's for sure."

I could tell he wanted me to change the topic away from his dead wife but could never bring himself to ask, I said it was an impressive beard (it was) and asked what if someone who knew his real name turned up. "Everyone who knew that name is gone, dead an' gone. The name died with them; only positive." And if you didn't just cling to any silver lining no matter how thin, like losing a name you hated. But in his eyes - and only for a moment - I saw something else, a tenderness. As though his real name was all he had left of his life in the whole galaxy and he didn't want it shared and sullied. The only thing left pure in a world corrupted beyond repair.

"Not that it matters since everyone calls me Ratman. Spent ages comin' up with a new name an' nobody bothers using it." He went into tunnels or maybe I should be more specific, he went into the smaller, tighter maintenance shafts that interconnected the main train tunnels. "We got maps, more maps an' blueprints that you could ever look through. Doesn't stop us finding hiding holes that we miss on the first sweep an' ain't on the maps." I knew what he meant by 'finding' because I had seen it for myself.

Everyone relaxing (as much as you _could_ relax on Earth) or hunkering down for the night when a husk appears from nowhere, hauling itself up silently from some loosened drainage gate. Maybe it mauls a guy, maybe it doesn't. Maybe there's more than one, maybe a marine dies in a panic of crossfire. "You'll get some officer who thinks droppin' a 'nade down the hole in question will sort the problem. Only for him to wake to more gunfire an' bodies. Ain't nowhere for you to hide dead guys an' you can't always get 'em to the surface right away. Wrap 'em up best you can but you can't hide the smell. Guys like me are in high demand down here."

He would wriggle into the holes husks appeared from, scope them out and see if he couldn't figure out where they kept coming from. "I'm playin' whack-a-mole mostly, half because the officers who call me out just want me to cave the thing in an' half because I don't have the time to search as much as I would like." His face brightened a tad when I told him I was an ATO, "Then you know what I have to deal with, people only wantin' you to fix their immediate problems. If I had more guys I could figure out where they're gettin' in from the surface an' stop 'em." But it was strictly a volunteer-only occupation. You needed a certain mindset to crawl in there. You had to take off your armour to fit and only a side-arm was any use in such close-quarters. There were maybe a dozen or so guys like him.

I asked around about Ratman, ferried about as I was much like him. "Ratman? Naw man you mean the Tapeworm, or maybe it's two different people? They all fucking crazy anyways, crawling in they holes. Husks down in them shafts, man. You can hear 'em staggering about under you, above you. They meet 'em sometimes when they head down. Face to face in them tunnels with no armour and just a pistol? Fuck that, man. Fuck. That." Which was the general consensus, stern appreciation for what they did with a sprinkling of quiet disbelief and a shake of the head.

"I know what they think of me an' the others an' maybe they're right an' maybe we are crazy. But here's the way I see it; we're all fucking dead already." In those few days we worked closely it was the only profanity I heard from him and it was like hearing the word for the first time all over again, with all its power restored. "Death covers this ball of rock like a nuclear winter an' all you can do is hide down away from it an' back yourself into a corner. Up there? On the surface? You can die a million different ways, never know an' feel it forever. At least down here with my back to the wall I can see it comin' for me, down here in one of them holes with a husk at least I _know_." And I understood, sure as I knew anything else in my life. When death falls from above all you can do is dig down to the devil.

"Never get used to the smell though an' husks stink up the place same as people when they're dead." He saw in my face that he was pulling me down and tried to cheer me back up. "I slipped into some long shaft an' went for twenty yards or somethin', just enough room to turn around. I get to a partial cave-in that left a hole big enough for my head but no way I'm gettin' my shoulders through so I turn an' start back again. But I hear the tell-tale groans an' shuffles an' turn _again_ to see a husk with its head through the hole. Silly damn thing got himself stuck an' I'm about to put one in its head when it keeps comin'. Professional curiousity has me watch the thing break both its shoulders to get through an' man if you couldn't _hear_ those breaks. I wait until it gets through an' flops around a little tryin' to push itself with its feet, then shoot it. These things would die to kill us."

His story didn't cheer me up but he grinned and grinned, stretching the thick beard and moustache.


End file.
